Inner Beauty: Suffering Explained Ovid, Bruegel, Auden, Dennett and the Fall of Icarus

Abstract

This essay is an exploration of the intertextual peregrinations of the Icarus myth. My aim is to trace how the idea
of human suffering was taken up in four distinct sub-fields in the history of ideas: its classical origin in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses; its painterly expression and aesthetic of the Northern Renaissance in Bruegel’s Landscape with Fall of Icarus; in W.H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts; and finally in Daniel Dennett’s works Consciousness Explained and Kinds of Minds. As he articulates the need for an “enduring subject” for suffering to matter, Dennett’s arguments are overlaid with ethical concerns.  The phenomenon of “dissociation” in the presence of great pain, fear or abuse becomes a way to explain how the enduring subject can simply leave. I conclude by setting Dennett in front of the Breughel and asking how he will assess the chances of Icarus’ survival as a work of art in the absence of a belief system provided by organized religion.

Borrowing Gould and Vrba’s concept of ‘exaptation,’ I trace the transformations from Ovid to Breughel to Auden and finally to Dennett's sense-making as each interpreter offers an admittedly idiosyncratic response to prior, available material. The deformations or decentering of the Icarus myth can be thought of as an example of how
strong artists, poets and philosophers engaged in the transformation and the production of new works of art, poetry, and philosophy. Only by tracing this decentering process could the theme of suffering come into
focus and become available as a lens—an iris—through which the act of interpretation can be understood: a form of bricolage, a scavenging for meanings.

Keywords: Icarus, Peter Bruegel the Elder, Intertextuality, Daniel Dennett, Exaptation